Christovao Ferreira
Christovao Ferreira, the former Provincial of the Society of Jesus in Japan, is the central figure of apostasy in Shusaku Endo's Silence, whose defection after the pit torture shatters the mission and becomes the haunting precedent for the younger priest Sebastian Rodrigues. His subsequent collaboration with the persecutors, his adoption of the Japanese name Sawano Chuan, and his philosophical justification of his fall—that Japan is a swamp in which Christianity cannot take root—make him the novel's most complex embodiment of defeat, survival, and the silence of God.
Identity and Background
Ferreira was a Portuguese Jesuit of considerable ability, sent to Japan by the Society of Jesus, where he spent thirty-three years and rose to the high position of provincial. He was a theologian and an experienced missionary held in the highest respect, a source of inspiration to priests and faithful alike. In the time of persecution he secretly made his way into the Kamigata region to pursue his apostolic work, and the letters he sent to Rome overflowed with a spirit of indomitable courage. He was the teacher of Sebastian Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe, and Juan de Santa Marta, who studied under him at the ancient monastery of Campolide in Lisbon. To these young men, it was impossible to believe that their much-admired teacher, faced with the possibility of a glorious martyrdom, had grovelled like a dog before the infidel.
Apostasy and Collaboration
After six hours of agony in the pit—the torture of being hung upside down in a pit of filth, with small incisions made behind the ears to let blood drip slowly—Ferreira gave the signal of apostasy. His defection was a cruel shock to the Church, all the more so when it became known that he was collaborating with his former persecutors. He took a Japanese name, Sawano Chuan, and lived in a mansion in Nagasaki together with the wife and children of an executed man. At the magistrate's order, he translated a book on astronomy and wrote a refutation of Christianity called Gengiroku, which Inoue praised as well done. When Rodrigues first meets him at the temple Saishoji, Ferreira appears in a black kimono, his beard shaved off, his chin and upper lip smooth and clean-shaven—a detail that strikes Rodrigues as reflecting a terrible sensuality. The interpreter boasts that Ferreira is "helping us Japanese" and that he has a Japanese name, Sawano Chuan.
The Meeting with Rodrigues
When Rodrigues is brought to meet him, Ferreira initially displays a challenging smile, then a servile smile and momentary shame. He speaks rapidly and hastily about his translation of astronomy, emphasizing that he is of some use to this country, that he can perform some service. Rodrigues perceives that Ferreira is not only talking to him but to the interpreter and the bonze, wanting them to hear, and that he keeps prattling to justify his existence in his own eyes. When the interpreter reveals that Ferreira is also writing Gengiroku to refute Christianity, a white tear glistens in Ferreira's eye. He shows Rodrigues the scar behind his ear from the pit, saying, "For twenty years I have laboured in this country. I know it better than you." He declares that the Japanese have never had the concept of God and never will, that they cannot think of an existence that transcends the human, and that the sapling of Christianity has decayed at its roots in the swamp of Japan. Rodrigues cries out that this is not the Ferreira he knew, and Ferreira answers, "True. I am not Ferreira. I am a man who has received from the magistrate the name of Sawano Chuan."
The Night of Rodrigues' Apostasy
On the night Rodrigues is to apostatize, Ferreira is brought to the prison. He tells Rodrigues that the groaning he hears is not snoring but the moaning of Christians hanging in the pit. He reveals that he himself engraved the words "Laudate Eum" on the wall of that same cell. He confesses that he did not apostatize because he was suspended in the pit—for three days he endured it without betraying his God. The reason he apostatized was that he was put in that cell and heard the voices of those people for whom God did nothing. "I prayed with all my strength but God did nothing," he says. He argues that Rodrigues is preoccupied with his own salvation, that he dreads to betray the Church, and then delivers the decisive line: "Certainly Christ would have apostatised for them." He repeats, "For love Christ would have apostatised. Even if it meant giving up everything he had." He takes Rodrigues gently by the shoulder and says, "You are now going to perform the most painful act of love that has ever been performed."
Life After Apostasy
After Rodrigues' apostasy, both men live in Nagasaki, forbidden to meet freely. They only see each other when they are escorted to the magistrate's office. Both wear the clothes they received from the magistrate's office and greet one another in strange Japanese so that the otona may know what they are saying. Rodrigues feels a complexity of emotions toward Ferreira: hatred and contempt, but also pity and a common feeling of self-pity. He reflects that they are like two ugly twins, hating one another's ugliness but inseparable. When they part, neither is able to plumb the depths of the other's solitude. The Dutch clerk Jonassen records that Ferreira, whom he calls "blackhearted," is writing various things about the Dutch and the Portuguese and sending them to the Imperial Court, and that he testified to the Supreme Authorities that there are Roman Catholics among the Dutch and that priests might come over on board Dutch vessels.
Death and Legacy
Ferreira's subsequent life and death remain mysterious. His grave can still be seen in a temple in Nagasaki, but the record of his burial was burnt in the atomic holocaust of 1945. Chinese sailors at Macao testified that prior to his death he had revoked his apostasy, dying a martyr's death in that pit which had previously conquered him. But the Dutch residents in Japan say nothing of this, and so his death, as much of his life, must forever remain a mystery. The novel's appendix records that Okada San'emon—Rodrigues' Japanese name—died in the Christian Residence in Edo, but no such record is given for Ferreira. His legacy in the novel is the devastating argument that Japan is a swamp that cannot absorb Christianity, an argument that Rodrigues both resists and internalizes, and that Inoue himself repeats: "Father, you were not defeated by me. You were defeated by this swamp of Japan."
